[MUSIC] In this module, we're gonna talk about ethics and privacy and as with many of the topics in these courses in this specialization, this topic warrants a entire course unto itself. But, just like we've done with the other topics, what we're going to do is try to give you an overview of the important concepts in the area. We're going to motivate this with real world examples and we're going to do a technical deep dive into particularly important concepts, or to make sure you have an intuition for how to use them and how to apply them elsewhere. What we hope is that this will be enough of an appetite whetting exercise to encourage you to go take an entire course on ethics and privacy in big data and data science, of which there are many starting to emerge. We've done this with databases and large scale data management systems. We've done this with machine learning. We've done this with statistics. We've done this with visualization. Now, we're gonna try to give it a treatment of this topic. Cherry picking topics that we think are especially relevant given the theme of the course and given things that I'm interested in. I want to start off with a study that was conducted quite a while ago in 1979, in Barrow, Alaska. Barrow is the northernmost point in the United States, northernmost city in the United States and it's a rural community. This is a zoom in shot and you can see those lakes in the aerial, you can see those lakes, as well. This was a Native American community that has been hunting whales for thousands of years and since World War II, there have been significant economic changes over a short time. Native leaders and city officials were concerned about the use of alcohol in the community and the associated violence and invited a group of sociology researchers to assess the problem and work with them to devise solutions. So, a team came in, and the methods used here were to collect a representative sample of everyone over the age of 15. Although, as we'll mention in a moment, they targeted the Native community in particular, and they interviewed them on attitudes and values associated with the use of alcohol, including psychological histories. They gave them a standardized alcoholism screening test that had been devised previously and asked them to draw a picture of a person which was intended to determine cultural identity. If you draw someone in a certain style, than that suggests that you're coming from the perspective of a particular community. If you draw someone in another style, it shows you're from another particular community and that's a method that was accepted at the time. The results of the study, the particular numbers are not terribly important, you can look them up but the overall effect was that alcoholism was pretty extreme there. There was widespread use and abuse of alcohol and associated with the problems that that would entail. The reason why I want to bring up this study that was not so much just for the results itself, it's the manner in which it was released and the overall context in which this study was done in order to motivate some of the ethical considerations. In particular, the results of this study were announced unilaterally and publicly in two forms simultaneously. One was a report was released and simultaneously, a press conference was held to the Barrow community, crucially, without representation from the tribal communities that were reflected in the study, even at the press conference. The report was picked up by the press and it became a front page New York Times story titled alcohol plagues Eskimos, alcoholism plagues Eskimo village. You can imagine the effect here, the quotes here in this article you can see, they're practically committing suicide by mass alcoholism. University of Pennsylvania researchers said yesterday, the alcoholism rate is 72% among the 2,000 Eskimo men and women in the village of Barrow. Violence is becoming the leading cause of injury and death. So the effects of this study on the populous were pretty immediate. If you were a member of the Barrow community, if you're a member of the Iñupiat tribe, you were associated with the brand presented in this article in a very, very public way. Further, the results of the Barrow Alcohol Study, it says here were revealed in the context of a press conference that was held far away from the native village. Without the presence and much less the knowledge or consent of any community member who might have been able to present any context concerning the socioeconomic conditions of the village. So the study results suggested that nearly all adults of the Iñupiat were alcoholics. In addition to the shame, the town's Standard & Poor bond rating suffered as a result, which in turn decreased the tribe's ability to secure funding for much needed projects. This was a direct financial harm incurred by the community, the inability to get loans in order to proceed with public works projects. There's a number of articles that were written after this, reflecting how they were upset about this and the harms they had faced. There's this subtle side effect too that's one of the reasons why this study is so well known in the medical and sociological and ethics' communities, as an example, is that research itself has a bad reputation among Native peoples. Not only in this area but widespread, in part, because of this study and others like it. Research has been described as probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary as a result of this. This is important to understand what went wrong here and there's a couple of particular points that I wanna make about this particular study. >> [MUSIC]